David Park Curry |
IN BALTIMORE:
SITTING WITH
HUMPTY DUMPTY |
“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words
mean so many different things.”
Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall [fig. 1]. Big mistake. But he made more than
just a mess on the lawn. The familiar nursery rhyme uses reduplicative language
– repeating the root or stem of a word, or at least part of it to achieve
expressive, figurative, or iconic speech, a practice that happens in many
tongues. Originally 18th-century English slang for a short, clumsy person,
Humpty Dumpty gradually became associated with a range of disconnects
in history, literature, and popular culture, from Cardinal Wolsey’s political
downfall to Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker’s fragmented state of mind in
Finnegans Wake by James Joyce, to a terrorist character in the Batman
series, not to mention innumerable lyrics about broken hearts and failed
relationships. He recently opened to mixed reviews in a Triple Shadow
Company production in the East Village.1 These days, Humpty Dumpty
even haunts the odd website. He’s everywhere!
What has an anthropomorphic egg scattered all over the place to do
with the extensive collection of historic painted furniture at the Baltimore
Museum of Art? I am thinking about Humpty Dumpty’s semantic
exchange with Alice in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass, and
What Alice Found There (London, 1871). I want to suggest that, in a marketplace
driven by constant innovation, visual history—like Humpty
Dumpty—is easily fragmented. Furniture forms replicate the same functions
over and over, providing seating, storage, surfaces for activities or display,
and so on. Yet individual designs, materials, and decoration result in
widely varied visual expression. Curators seeking ways to liven up a dreary
period or style-based gallery might juxtapose pieces that seem disparate at
first glance, putting ideas together again in a stimulating visual conversation
between the old and the new. (Not sure I’d try this at home.) [fig. 2]
Like words – chairs and tables, cabinets and clocks, can express many different
things, particularly when we consider how they are ornamented, for
whom they were made, who later possessed them, and how we view them
now. I’m going to have a look and see what’s to be found.
“Humpty Dumpty” first broke into print in 1810. He might have been
better off perched, however stiffly, on a chair. Like Martha Eliza Stevens
Edgar Paschall of Kaskaskia, Illinois, immortalized about a decade later as
a bold set of disembodied shapes floating above a precariously tilted floor
cloth [fig. 3]. About fifteen years of age at the time she was painted,
Martha Eliza was about to wed General John Edgar, a man many years her senior. Less than another decade passed before the young widow Edgar
brought one of the biggest fortunes in the Northwest Territory to her second
marriage. Her new husband, Nathaniel Paschall, was a previously
rejected suitor; he had since left Kaskaskia penniless to become a newspaperman
in St. Louis.2 A no-nonsense look in her eye, Martha Eliza clutches
her reticule in one hand, with the other she firmly grasps the mate to the
side chair hidden under her determinedly fashionable gown. Painted a rich
green, embellished with brash gilt ornamentation, endowed with balloonshaped
seat, the chair is easily recognized as a typical piece of American
fancy furniture made for the popular market during the first quarter of the
19th century.3 Exuberant ornamentation has been melded with efficient,
inexpensive construction incorporating ready made rush seats, uniform
drilled and turned legs, styles, and stretchers.
Were hers a magic carpet so that she could join us now, we might invite
Martha Eliza to take a different seat. Perhaps, say, the 50 Dozen Chair [fig.
4] designed by Jeremy Alden in 2005 as a thesis project at the Pratt
Institute in New York. This painted chair, too, addresses an efficient (albeit
repurposed) technology. 50 Dozen is made up of six hundred mass produced
egg-yolk yellow Dixon Ticonderoga #2 pencils glued together to combine
lightness with surprising columnar strength. Martha Eliza well might recognize
the pencil as we know it today. This long-popular tool for ephemeral
writing has been manufactured in the United States using variations on the
same process since William Monroe began sandwiching pencil lead
between thin sheets of cedar to take advantage of the broken supply channels
for British pencils during the War of 1812.4 Accustomed to erasing
mistakes using a separate piece of rubber (the tree sap of Hevea brasiliensis,
named by Joseph Priestly in 1770 for its ability to rub out graphite
marks 5), she might be put off by the soft little tip glued into a metal cup
at the end of each pencil. She was already a lady of a certain age when
Hymen L. Lipman filed his patent for a pencil with attached eraser in
1858, and she might well have agreed with a complaint printed in 1861
about “that newfangled eraser, something between a hearthstone and
a…knife-board” that would “rub its way through anything.”6 But matte
pink notes created by eraser tips scattered rhythmically across the bright
yellow surface of Alden’s chair are quite another matter; they are as satisfying
as repeating scalloped forms ornamenting the hem of Martha Eliza’s
gown. Alden himself comments, “I believe designers need to understand
their materials – not just the physical properties but the cultural, historical,
and social references.” These are far richer than those evident at first
glance. It was Joseph Dixon whose Ticonderoga line raised American pencil-
making from a New England cottage industry into America’s industrial
mainstream. And Henry David Thoreau, the son of Dixon’s associate John
Thoreau, can be remembered not only for meditations at Walden Pond, but
also for America’s best wood-cased pencils of the mid-19th century [fig. 5]. Not entirely committed to the family pencil business, which he finally gave
up in 1853, Thoreau was far more interested in teaching.7 Alden associates
his pencil chair with “elementary school, test taking, the smell of erasers,”
but what he conceived is a spare and sprightly form that resonates with the
elegance of painted furniture of the late 18th and early 19th centuries.
50 Dozen’s rectilinear probity points us towards a four-square predecessor;
part of a small group made before 1793 [fig. 6]. These New
England chairs have been familiar to scholars, collectors, and dealers since
the early 20th century, yet they long remained a puzzler, ascribed (with
some trepidation) to John Seymour, one of Boston’s finest cabinetmakers
of the federal period. Somehow, the construction of the chairs didn’t live
up to John Seymour’s considerable talent. They have recently been reattributed
to his son, John Seymour Jr., working in Portsmouth, New Hampshire,
where Seymour senior began his career.8 Unlike the famous and longer
lived father, the son worked primarily as a painter, not a cabinetmaker, until
his untimely death in 1793. The chair’s joinery is crude and the frames
tend to warp, but the decoration offers a marvelous two-dimensional
graphic enhanced by the adept use of positive and negative space. It features
a distinctive urn-shaped splat flanked by marbleized columns topped
with imaginative double capitals [fig. 7]. Bright blue striping not only resonates
with the blue-green urn but also ornamentally restates the severe
rectilinear frame, an instructive deployment of color that would later be
used to articulate the structure of modernist iron buildings such as the
Crystal Palace (London, 1851).9 On the seat rail, a panel filled with demure
roses reveals a different hand, possibly that of John Seymour Jr. himself—
painted furniture almost invariably involves collaborative effort. The
English-born craftsman’s work is virtually contemporary with George
Hepplewhite’s influential Cabinet-Maker and Upholsterer’s Guide (London, 1788) in which the author observed, “a new and very elegant
fashion has arisen within these few years, of finishing [chairs] with painted
or japanned work, giving a rich and splendid appearance to the minuter
parts of the ornaments, which are generally thrown in by the painter.”10
Alden’s clever appropriation of extant technology and its festive yellow
result points us toward another, slightly later ancestor, made by Samuel
Gragg in Boston [fig. 8]. Dramatic load-bearing curves and the comforting
name “elastic” in Gragg’s 1808 patent documents testify to savvy marketing
of technology in the service of expressive design two hundred years
ago. While the application of heat and moisture to shape pieces of wood
dates back to the ancient world, it was chiefly used for ship staves and wheel
rims until the 18th century. Gragg, whose father was a wheelwright, captured
a fluid line with a pair of almost pencil-thin bent wooden elements
that spring from the floor as front legs, continuing upward to bracket seat
and back before ending at the crest rail. Five parallel stiles move in the
opposite direction, forming the back by extending downwards from the crest rail, then becoming part of the seat itself. Generously shaped arms
provide an additional set of counter curves for this abstract version of an
ancient Greek klismos chair. The klismos, often sketched on ancient pottery
vases and carved on marble memorial stelae, is a seating form much
beloved by neoclassical designers with an archaeological bent. The name
derives from a Greek verb, “klinen”—to recline. The year that Gragg
patented his process, he enticed readers of the Independent Chronicle to
visit the Furniture Warehouse in Boston’s crowded South End. There, he
kept, “constantly on hand, all kinds of Fancy and Bamboo chairs, of the
newest fashion, which he offers for sale on as good terms as can be purchased
in Boston.”11 The tawny yellow paint on his steam-bent chair has
been further shaded to suggest split bamboo, an effect also evoked when a
sheaf of yellow pencils is glued together to form a chair leg.
The real bamboo chairs stocked by Samuel Gragg were probably
imported from Asia, although eventually Americans made some bamboo
furniture here. Trade with the Far East also explains why most American
pencils –Ticonderoga or otherwise – are painted yellow. Pencil lead is a mixture
of powdered graphite and clay, a French recipe that dates to 1795. After
the mid-1850s, the finest graphite available on the world market came from
a Siberian mine near the Chinese/Russian border. American pencil manufacturers
imported this graphite, and painted the wood casings yellow, a color
associated with the Chinese imperial family, to announce quality merchandise.
Thus, Alden’s regal 50 Dozen chair might appropriately be drawn up to
a flamboyant Chinoiserie gaming table, painted and gilded in Baltimore
around 1815, at a time when the city’s fancy furniture was unequalled in the
United States [fig 9]. The table descended through the Donnells, one of
Baltimore’s prosperous mercantile families. A related chair at the Winterthur
Museum suggests that John Donnell [1754-1827] ordered an entire suite of
similarly decorated pieces. The entrepreneurial shipping merchant rejoiced
in his commercial success by occupying and furnishing Willow Brook, a late
18th-century villa overlooking the Patapsco River west of Baltimore’s early
city limits. Recalling whimsical Rococo Chinoiserie seen earlier on luxurious
japanned furniture made in Boston [fig. 10], the ornamentation may be a nod
to Donnell’s lucrative dealings with exotic distant ports.12 The table probably
represents collaboration between Thomas Renshaw, a maker of fancy furniture
who transferred his business from Washington to Baltimore early in the
19th century, and John Barnhart, who had started his Baltimore career as a
sign painter by 1799. Barnhart is known to have worked with Renshaw briefly
in 1814–1815, allowing us to pinpoint the date of the table’s creation. It may
have witnessed battles between the Red Queen and the White, as rambunctious
as those encountered by Alice as she moved, pawn-like, across the
metaphoric chessboard of Wonderland in Through the Looking-Glass.
Imported from China, the Donnell family’s intricately carved ivory chess set,
half of it stained carmine, also survives. [fig. 11]
The sheer exuberance of the Donnell table exemplifies the artistic
excellence that gave Baltimore cabinetmakers an edge over competitors
making painted furniture up and down the Eastern seaboard at the turn of
the 19th century. The port city on the Chesapeake Bay blossomed as a bustling
commercial center, and many talented cabinetmakers sought custom here.13 Among them, the English-born Finlay brothers created a flourishing enterprise,
advertising furniture “in all colors, gilt ornamented, and varnished
in a style not equaled on the continent.” These were to be had “with or
without views adjacent to the city.”14 Working with John and Hugh Finlay
between 1804 and 1806, Francis Guy was the artist responsible for the
“views” of actual buildings that make these tables, benches, and chairs
unique. Touching on civic pride, Guy’s pictorial decoration helped the
Finlays attract Baltimore’s richest and most stylish patrons, at the same
time blurring the distinction between “fine” and “decorative” art. The
suite was not made for domestic use; rather it celebrated domesticity: genteel
country life in elegant villas built on the hills surrounding the city.
Originally the furniture stood in the Assembly Rooms, a public meeting
place where the great and the good of Baltimore gathered for social pleasures
doubtless mixed with business.15 A vignette of Willow Brook, the
Donnell family’s country villa, ornaments one of the chairs [figs. 12; 13].
Like Willow Brook, most of the buildings depicted on the suite are long
gone. Once later generations of Donnells initiated speculative housing
development in the mid 1840s, their twenty-six acre estate began to disappear.
A current site photograph of the spot where Willow Brook once stood
eloquently rings the changes. [fig. 14] Today, the suite of furniture is on
view at the Baltimore Museum of Art in the neoclassical yellow oval parlor
rescued when Willow Brook was demolished in 1965.
The Donnell family’s house lasted longer than most depicted by Guy;
indeed only two of the structures that decorate the furniture survive today.
One does not usually think of an armchair as an architectural document,
but in many cases, Guy’s decorations are the only known images of early
buildings. Before it was completely overwhelmed by urbanization, Willow
Brook found itself confined to a single city block. The former villa served
as a convent and home for wayward girls. Latterly, the West Baltimore
neighborhood as it now appears has been used to film episodes of The
Wire, David Simon’s serial police drama that captures a dark and brutal
energy quite different from the entrepreneurial optimism of the city’s
founding elite.
NOTES
1. “Alice: End of Daze,” at La MaMa E.T.C., reviewed The New York Times, 6 May 2008, p. B6.
2. James H. Roberts, “The Life and Times of General John Edgar,” Transactions of the Illinois
Historical Society, 1907: 12: 71-73.
3. For an overview, see Sumpter T. Priddy, III, American Fancy: Exuberance in the Arts, 1790-1840
(Milwaukee: The Chipstone Foundation, 2004).
4. The first “modern” pencils appear much earlier, in the mid 1500s, and like the history of
American furniture, American wood-case pencil manufacture has its roots in Great Britain and continental
Europe. Pencil-making emerged from the woodworking craft of joiners, who had the ability
to shape and assemble small pieces of wood. For a definitive study see Henry Petroski, The Pencil:
A History of Design and Circumstance (NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990).
5. In 1770, Edward Nairne, a shopkeeper at 20 Cornhill, London, first sold cubes of natural rubber
for use as erasers.
6. The Pencil, p. 177. The eraser-tipped pencil was not universally popular until the twentieth century.
7. “An American Pencil-Making Family,” The Pencil, pp. 104-125.
8. Robert D. Mussey Jr., The Furniture Masterworks of John & Thomas Seymour (Salem: Peabody
Essex Museum, 2003) , pp. 272-273. In 1785, John Seymour (1738-1819) immigrated with his wife
and eight children from Axminster, Devon, to Portland, Maine. After his eldest son’s death, he
moved to Boston in 1794. There, he and his son Thomas Seymour (1771-1848) created memorable
federal furniture.
9. Joseph Paxton’s glass and iron building was the first example of modular architecture. All its
structural members were exposed; Owen Jones painted them in a primary color scheme of red, yellow,
and blue. See M. Darby and David van Zanten, “Owen Jones’s Iron Buildings of the 1850s,”
Architectura, (Munich), IV, 1974, pp. 53-75.
10. George Heppelwhite, The Cabinet-Maker and Upholsterer’s Guide, 3rd ed (1794); reprint (NY:
Dover, 1969), p. 2.
11. Independent Chronicle, Boston, 25 February 1808, cited Patricia E. Kane, “Samuel Gragg: His
Bentwood Fancy Chairs,” Yale University Art Gallery Bulletin, vol. 33, no. 2 (Autumn, 1971), p. 33.
12. The house was actually built by Donnell’s uncle, Thorogood Smith; financial reverses forced him
to auction the property off to his nephew. A still-extant neighborhood called Canton recalls
Baltimore’s early trade with the East. Canton occupies land once owned by yet another merchant
trader, Captain John O’Donnell (d. 1805), who brought the first shipload of goods from China to
Baltimore in 1785.
13. Nearly two hundred cabinetmaking individuals and partnerships were active between 1760 and
1810. Baltimore Furniture: The Work of Baltimore and Annapolis Cabinetmakers from 1760 to 1810 (Baltimore: Baltimore Museum of Art, 1947), pp. 190-192.
14. Federal Gazette, Baltimore, October 24, 1803.
15. Lance Humphries, “Provenance, Patronage, and Perception: the Morris Suite of Baltimore
Painted Furniture,” American Furniture (2003), ed. Luke Beckerdite (Milwaukee: Chipstone
Foundation), pp. 138-212.
—
DAVID PARK CURRY, senior curator of Decorative Arts, American Painting &
Sculpture at the Baltimore Museum of Art, specializes in American and European
art of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Currently charged with reinstalling
the BMA’s American wing, he is particularly interested in exploring cultural
crossroads where art, decoration, and commerce intersect. Dr. Curry has lectured
widely in the United States and England, and published on Homer, Whistler, Sargent, American Impressionism and Realism, folk art, Victorian architecture
and decoration, world fairs, and period framing. His most recent monograph,
James McNeill Whistler: Uneasy Pieces, was published in 2004. He is currently
working on a contextual study of the Hayes presidential china as well as a short
book on William Merritt Chase’s fish pictures.
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